Harry Bertoia: Fifty Drawings

Privately published, 1980

Hand-numbered 448 of 500

Published two years after Bertoia's death in 1978, Fifty Drawings is a memorial edition produced privately by the artist's family. Only 500 copies were made: ten bound in half leather and numbered in roman numerals, and 490 in the wrappered edition, of which this is copy 448, hand-numbered.

Portfolio of fifty monochrome plates, each measuring 12.5 × 9.75 inches, issued on uncut, untrimmed sheets. The letterpress text was set in Aldine Bembo and printed on Rives heavyweight mould-made paper by A. Colish of Mount Vernon, New York, one of the great American fine-press printers of the twentieth century. The design is by Quentin Fiore, the legendary graphic designer best known for Marshall McLuhan's The Medium is the Massage. A portrait of Bertoia by photographer Joseph Seraphin accompanies the plates.

The drawings themselves reveal the private Bertoia. The public knew him as the designer but nearly every evening of his working life, Bertoia drew. His works on paper, thousands of monotypes and drawings produced from the 1940s until his death were where his ideas began. The fifty sheets gathered here is lifelong practice.

Bertoia's biography reads like a map of American modernism. Born in San Lorenzo, Italy, in 1915, he emigrated to Detroit at fifteen, studied metalwork at Cass Technical High School, and won a scholarship to Cranbrook Academy of Art in 1937, where his circle included Charles and Ray Eames, Florence Knoll, and Walter Gropius. He taught metalworking at Cranbrook, made abstract jewelry, worked alongside the Eameses in California on molded plywood, and in 1950 settled in Bally, Pennsylvania, where he built the studio that produced his furniture, monumental commissions, and sound sculpture until his death in November 1978.

Interest in Bertoia's full artistic range has surged in recent years: the Harry Bertoia Foundation launched a catalogue raisonné project in 2019, and in 2022 the Nasher Sculpture Center mounted the first U.S. museum retrospective of his career in nearly fifty years. Fifty Drawings , scarce, privately printed, and never reissued remains the essential document of his works on paper.

Details: Mount Vernon, NY: privately printed at the press of A. Colish, 1980. Fifty monochrome plates (12.5 × 9.75 in.) on untrimmed sheets, letterpress text, portrait photograph by Joseph Seraphin. Design by Quentin Fiore. Copy 448 of 500. Original slipcase.